Today we are talking about Taoism and biology, perhaps more specifically the Tao of biology.

The idea that time had a beginning and moves in a linear fashion gives rise to a notion that life actually follows rules or heuristics of some sort. In your experience is this at all true, really?

It seems more to me like things are moving through time, not that time itself is moving in a “line.”

I think so to a certain degree.

It is the same yet full of surprises.

In Taoism, the world and universe itself would be better modelled by the theory of rainbow gravity than any model that supports the notion of linear time. The word Tao is a term used to describe something for which they say there can be no real name. Time and space in Taoism are more akin to the krebs cycle in the human body than they are to any mechanistic linear system. Everything is perpetually recycled, including time and space itself.

So evolution would follow a pattern more like that put forth in Sheldrake’s theories than they would any sort of mechanistic progressive complexity theory. The forms that everything will take already exist, and what we experience as change is just the various stages of phase transition in a force they call chi. Chi is compared to air, but it is not literally the same as air. It would perhaps be closer to plasma or even pure energy like the virtual particles of quantum physics. As these measures of energy collapse or condense, they give rise to life as we know it. When they expand and diffuse again, they feed back into the potential energy or potentiation of consciousness in the universe itself.

According to the model of Tao, and an increasingly popular theory in the neuroscientific community, your individual consciousness or identity is a center of self-organized criticality. Metaphorically speaking according to both many thinkers in neuroscience and Taoism, you have a sand-pile mind. Little trickles of disordered activity that give rise to larger more organized patterns of behaviour. Little events in the world around you seem to follow no real rhyme or reason, but when you shift your attention to a larger frame of reference then it all seems entirely meaningful and necessary.

This is the core wisdom of Taoism actually. This understanding of the greater relationship between all things, including all the different forms of organism in our world.

People think sand doesn’t move but it moves like water, just more slowly. Sand moves a great deal. Under the right circumstances it even sings.

It does? Like in a sand storm? Indeed, I have heard the song of the sands myself in real life. Hot sunny day with a steady but relatively mild wind. That drift in the sand, the little shifts that give rise to the bigger movements, is present in living evolution as well.

The sand was quite vocal when I was on a beach in Washington State a couple weeks ago. It can indeed be. It can squeak and grind and burble, a lot of different sounds.

Hard packed sand sounds more thunderous. The soft sand much more relaxing.

Your thoughts are welcome. Be well friends.

Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~